Archive for
December, 2009

From all of us at Neatorama, we hope 2010 will bring good luck, good health, and happiness to all of you (or simply a better year if 2009 wasn’t that nice to you).
We’ve got a lot of neat things planned for 2010, so stay tuned. Have a safe and happy New Year!

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The OmniTread robot was built by engineering students at the University of Michigan. Its body consists of seven segments connected by pneumatic bellows. Treads on all four sides of the segments give it traction against surfaces, and the connecting bellows can inflate or deflate to provide stiffness or flexibility as needed. The robot can [...]

2009 ends tonight, and looking back at the weird stories of the year is always fun. Oddee has the twelve most memorable events that had us all doing double takes. Remember these?
6 year-old drives mom’s car.
68-year-old woman tries to get driver’s license for the 772nd time.
86 year-old woman catches thief with her crutch.
Calling 911 because [...]

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As one of millions of people who like the new Batman franchise, and can’t wait for Christopher Nolan to make part III, I must admit this song makes some valid criticisms regarding The Dark Knight. (via io9).

Who knew there were so many volcanoes in the news? If you were a volcano blogger like Dr. Erik Klemetti, you’d keep up with these kinds of things. Now he’s posted the volcanic activity from each month of 2009. Shown is the eruption of Mayon in the Philippines in December. Link

Most explanations of Darwinian evolution refer to genetic material as the manner in which changes are passed down to one’s descendants. Now, a study by Jiali Li of the Scripps Institute in Florida finds that prions, the proteins that cause diseases like mad cow disease evolve in response to their environment. Prions have no genes, [...]

In the Yamal penninsula of Siberia, resources are few, but the nomadic Nenets tribes survive by using the one resource as tough as they are: reindeer.
Their main occupation is reindeer breeding and all they have are reindeer, because they build houses of reindeer skin and make their clothes of it. There are a few thousand [...]